Social work students’ professional socialisation in China: experiences and challenges

ABSTRACT

Professional socialisation refers to the process that a student becomes a professional. Adopting this notion, the current study investigated social work students’ experiences in China, where a great proportion of graduates decided not to become social workers. The data were collected from student focus groups from six universities across BSW, MSW and MA programmes in China. Based on a professional socialisation conceptual framework, the findings showed that students’ professional development was hindered by limited pre-socialisation, insufficient content and structure support in programme training, and anticipated unmet career expectations. Implications for social work educators to address these challenges were discussed.

摘要

专业社会化是学生成长为专业人员的过程。基于这一理念, 本研究调查了中国社会工作学生的专业社会化经历。在中国, 有相当比例的社会工作专业毕业生没有选择成为社会工作者。本研究通过学生焦点小组的方式在中国六所大学搜集数据, 涵盖了社会工作本科专业项目、社会工作专业学位硕士研究生项目和社会工作方向的社会学硕士研究生项目。基于专业社会化的概念框架, 研究发现阻碍中国社会工作专业学生实现专业社会化的主要因素包括:有限的预专业社会化、专业教育的内容与结构支持不足, 以及预期无法被满足的职业期待。本研究探讨了社会工作教育者如何应对这些挑战。

KEYWORDS:

• China
• social work education
• professional development
• students’ experiences
• focus group interview

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) and the China Association of Social Work Education (CASWE) for making the China-US Social Work Education Collaborative Programme possible, through which this study was launched.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. To build up the social work workforce, social service providers who do not have formal social work training but have practice experiences are eligible to be included in the national social work licensure programme in China. Practice experiences generally refer to any experience in social services related to social work (Li et al. 2019).

2. In China, high school students choose their preferred universities and majors in their university applications. Once they are admitted to their preferred universities, the universities will assign majors to applicants based on their scores. If a student’s score is not high enough for his/her preferred major, the university can assign another major if the student agrees (Zhou and Xu 2012).

3. Community workers refer to the members of the Residents’ Committee (RC). In urban China, the RC is a grassroots organisation responsible for social administration and social service delivery in the neighbourhood. Its staff often lacks professional training but performs the duties of human service-related tasks (e.g. social benefits administration and family counselling) (Lin et al. 2011). In recent years, the governments began to promote the professionalisation of the RC staff by recruiting social work graduates (Lin et al. 2011) and allowing RC staff with four years or more experience to sit for the social work national licencing examination and upon passing be granted the status of a licenced social worker (Ministry of Personnel, PRC, and Ministry of Civil Affairs, PRC 2006).